Subject: Emprical research about how to teach/learn systems thinking skills

Posted by Prof. Dr. Niall Palfreyman on 2/26/2007
In Reply To:Emprical research about how to teach/learn systems thinking skills Posted by Jay W. Forrester on 2/24/2007

Message:

Jay W. Forrester schrieb:

> I believe that the hope of treating systems thinking (as distinguished
> from system dynamics modeling) as well defined, operationalized, and
> measured is not consistent with the nature of systems thinking...
> I believe that
> the drift toward systems thinking and away from explicit simulation is
> apt to be harmful to the understanding of systems.

Gosh. I really enjoy these occasionally shocking posts you send in, Dr. Forrester. My first reaction is: "Of _course_ systems thinking is helpful for the understanding of systems". But then I also see what you mean about operationalisation not being consistent with the nature of systems thinking. So this question comes up for me:

Which of the two is actually of most importance to us in education:
a) Aiding students towards a deep understanding of the intrinsic irreducibility of so many real-world systems (which is what I understand by systems thinking), or
b) Providing students with tools for understanding the functioning of complete systems (which is what I understand by system dynamics)?

> I will be much interested in seeing the explanations and defenses that
> may be offered for systems thinking.

It seems to me that both are worthwhile goals. Systems _are_ sometimes so difficult to reduce that it behooves us to let go of the easy assumption that analysing systems is somehow more "scientific" than simply observing them. On the other hand, systems dynamics provides the detailed understanding of system structure which can point out to us areas of reducibility and irreducibility in a system.

I have just come out of a meeting in which we discussed how much thermodynamics a bioinformatics student needs: all s/he really needs a "simple" awareness that chemical transformation is driven by entropy and enthalpy, _but_ this awareness is only fully achieved through detailed understanding of the nature of entropy and enthalpy.

What I'm trying to say is this. In my view ST gives us a very simple
message: systems are extremely difficult to predict. This is a valid message which many apologists for environmentally offensive industries would do well to understand. SD on the other hand gives us a more differentiated message: system structure is the basis for behaviour.
This message is essential for getting our choked-up world up and running again, but is just too detailed to be readily understood by those thousands of systems-sceptics out there.

Best wishes,
Niall Palfreyman.